The Swan and the Eagle
Sunday, October 19, 2025
This is C/2025 R2 SWAN, a comet discovered using the SWAN instrument onboard the SOHO spacecraft, as it travels near the same region of sky as M 16, the Eagle Nebula:
Their proximity in the night sky shouldn’t be mistaken as real proxmity—while the Eagle Nebula is roughly 5-6 thousand light-years away, C/2025 R2 SWAN is expected to come as close as 39 million km to Earth.